princess.  On his wedding night he had a vision of the celestial paradise, the dominion of chastity, and the earthly pool of sin.  Recognising in his bride a devil who had come to tempt him, he left her and fled into the desert.  Many legends illustrate the incapacity of the first millenary to realise the relationship between the sexes in any other sense.  Woman was evil; the struggle against her a laudable effort.

Very probably the stigmatising of all eroticism during that long spell of a thousand years was necessary.  Only the unnatural condemnation of love in its widest sense, a hatred of sex and woman such as was felt by Tertullian and Origen, could result in the reverse of sexuality—­purely spiritual love with its logical climax, the deification and worship of woman.  There can be no doubt that the Christian ideal of chastity was largely responsible for the evolution of the ideal of spiritual love.  The identity of love and chastity was propounded—­in sharp contrast to sexuality and—­more particularly amongst the later troubadours, such as Montanhagol, Sordello, and the poets of the “sweet new style” in Italy—­with a distinct leaning towards religious ecstasy.

Infinite tenderness pervaded the nascent cult of woman.  It seemed as if man were eager to compensate her for the indignity which he had heaped upon her for a thousand years.  His instinctive need to worship had found an incomparable being on earth before whom he prostrated himself.  She was the climax of earthly perfection; no word, no metaphor was sufficiently ecstatic to express the full fervour of his adoration; a new religion was created, and she was the presiding divinity.  “What were the world if beauteous woman were not?” sang Johannes Hadlaub, a German poet.

Once more I must revert to personality, the fundamental value of the European.  In antiquity, even in Greece and Rome, personality in its higher sense did not exist.  The hero was the epitome of all the energies of the nation, a term for the striving of the community; the statesman was the incarnate political will of the people; even the poet’s ideal was the representation of the Hellenic type in all its aspects.  Agamemnon was no more than the intelligent ruler, Achilles the headstrong hero, Odysseus the cunning adventurer.  The individual was a member and servant of the tribe, the town, the state; each man knew that his fellow did not essentially differ from him; and even at the period when Hellas was at its meridian the individuals were, compared to modern men, but slightly differentiated.  But the Greek differed from the Oriental, the barbarian, inasmuch as he felt himself no longer a component part of nature, but realised his distinct individuality.